Using Battery

[sven hauck]

Damn Germans.

[klooptheloop]

I actually don't think its even a bug, they just changed the way this was handled which makes it even more annoying .

I'll stick with usin' Guru so....

[admin]

I'll stick with usin' Guru so....

Good call, just had a look at that again this week. Had tried it out when it came out but wasn't feeling it too much. But it looks like this newer one is really nice and was giving me that MPC/Machine feel.

I just wish he'd sort the GUI a bit more so it's not so jumbled looking in Graph mode.

You got any good groove templates other than the stock ones and the MPC-3000 ones?

On a side note I got a copy of Reason 4 (doing a reiview of it for 365Mag) and that has some cool groove template stuff going on.

[Magnus]

Wow we see totally eye to eye on this one. I couldn't use Battery 3 and found it frustrating why they changed the things they did making the loading of cells with samples in particular, a major pain. So I just use 2.1.

On a side note something interesting I ran into with Battery 2. If you have 3GB of RAM or more, upon loading your project, Battery 2 will display a warning saying you are running low on physical memory are you sure you want to continue? I always say yes and everything works fine. I did some reading and I guess Battery 2 was programmed only to see and recognize 2GB of RAM so when there is more, it freaks out. So just a heads up if you see this error. That is my only peeve with 2.1 and it doesn't really hinder anything so its not that big of a deal. I LOVE Battery 2 and would highly recommend it to anyone for drums. Its such a well designed product. I'm not sure what happened with version 3. :confused:

Battery is a great piece for the studio, you really can't go wrong with it for efficiency.

That being said the new version 3 takes some steps back so I use 2 instead.

What's nice about Battery is that you can basically 'preload' samples into a cell you've got playing via some midi in your sequencer. So as you browse through your library the sample you've got selected will temporarily load into the cell so you can hear it in context. Credit to this function actually goes to fxpansion's dr-008 which had it first, NI then borrowed the idea.

So in pracitice what you do is say program your kick to note C1. Assign that to Battery and open it up. You'll see the cell assigned to C1 flashing/playing. Then you select load sample and go through your one shots. As you select them you will hear them play as if they had been fully loaded. It just makes it very easy to go through samples and more importantly hear them in the song without having to go back and forth between loading and unloading.

There might be some other samplers that do this now but other than this Battery does have some nice features for editing the envelopes of the samples amongst other things.

They key is that it's all clear and simple to use, which helps when you're trying to be creative.

The problem with 3 is it makes this process a pain as you first have to load a sample into the cell (2 lets you start with a blank one). Beyond that I always end up canceling my selection or making layers with 3, could not get my head around it even with a few looks in the manual.

Too bad as 3 does include some cool ways to manipulate samples.

But for bread and butter drum kits 2 is the way to go, I'd stick with that for now and it would be cheap as well.

I would like to make a distinction though that battery is not a drum machine per se'. It's a drum sample player, there is no sequencer on it like fxpansions' Guru.